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Saturday, March 16, 2013

Bippity Boppity Science

With the recent trend in the retelling/re imagining of fairy tales, there's an under-tapped avenue for SFR. Most science geeks rebuff the "magic concepts" behind fairy tale stories and look for more "serious" concepts and themes in the science community for their novels. But if you take a step back, remove the fairy from the tale and just look at the basics behind it, you can see the science in the tale.

Here are a couple examples. For the purpose of this post I'm going to use Grimm's watered down version of fairy tales, but if you're looking for darker takes as a jumping off point, definitely research the original tellings...trust me, they're not for young ears or eyes and can add a real twist to the story.

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By Toshiaki Kato

Beauty and the Beast: Woman comes to the aide of her beloved father and takes his place as prisoner in a beast's home. There, she come to love the beast, who turns out to be a shapeshifter with a broken heart who'd refused his human for until he falls for the woman.

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Source: Art Passions

﻿﻿ ﻿﻿﻿Sleeping Beauty: Several generations before the story an opposing person/party kidnaps a woman from a rich/ruling/government family and traps her in suspended animation. The kidnappers are caught and killed but not before they jetty her out into space. The parents put out a reward for her rescue. Decades go by with no luck, until an recently retired military man takes up the challenge on a dare during a stop at the planet.

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Source: Art Passions

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Snow White: A jealous family member "poisons" a young woman with some Nano viral infection and she falls into a comatose state. Grieving, the family places her in a stasis chamber in the hopes that one day they can find a cure. Several years go by when the galactic government get sword of the incident. They send out a team to research the case for any benefit/advancement in their own warfare arsenal.

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That's just my mind wanderings of 3 fairy tales. And, of course, they can be retrofitted for any sub genre or theme. The male/female roles can be reversed, or changed out for male/male or female/female.

What is your favorite fairy tale and how would a SF spin look on it?

(By the way, if any of these ideas sound good, feel free to use them. I've got hundreds of electronic post-its with ideas that I'll probably never get to and I'd love to see some of these fleshed out into a full story.)﻿

Sandra Sookoo did a SFR version of Beauty and the Beast - Fractured.I had half an idea to do Rapunzel in space, with a remote space station instead of a tower, but it's never developed. Thanks for reminding me about it though. It's something for a future project.